Free Blood Dues by Don Pendleton

roared again, lifting him off his feet, the force of one heavy round impacting on his chest, hurling him back several yards. He touched down by the empty bar with a single twitch before he came to final rest.
    LeRoy was wearing a pistol in his belt, with another in the desk drawer for emergencies like this. Except there had never been such an incident, and in the panic of the moment he could think of only one thing.
    Survival.
    Clearly, drawing down on this bad-ass dude was certain suicide. And Withers was not feeling suicidal. Not in the least.
    The cannon's muzzle was directly in his face now, looking larger than an oil drum at point-blank range. Withers half imagined he could crawl inside it if he tried, and hide there from the man who plainly meant to kill him.
    But the gunner did not fire. Instead he fished around inside a pocket of his flashy jacket, coming out with something small and silver, which he dropped in the middle of LeRoy's cluttered desk top.
    "Spread the word," the man growled, his voice graveyard cold. "I'm back. Somebody knows why."
    And LeRoy watched him retreat out of there with the satchel — LeRoy's goddamned satchel full of twenties and fifties — the blaster never wavering off its kill zone as he cleared the doorway, backing right across the club room on his way to the exit.
    Withers kept his eyes riveted on that pistol until the dude was out of there and clear. He made no move to follow, never seriously considering going after him and trying to retrieve the cash.
    LeRoy glanced around at the wasted bodies of his soldiers, then down at the spreading moisture in the crotch of his own maroon slacks.
    Some damn fine mess, yeah. Hell! But he was alive, still kicking, and now his job would be to stay that way. His hand was shaking as he reached for the telephone and started dialing.
    Spreading the word.

11
    The ten-year-old Cadillac cruised slowly eastward along Eighth Avenue. The driver kept a careful eye on other motorists and the flow of erratic pedestrians around him, while his three companions took in every detail of the boulevard.
    Eighth Avenue.
    The locals called it
Calle Ocho,
and it ran right through the heart of Miami's Little Havana district. It was the artery that fed the Cuban community's pulsing heart, alive with color, sound and movement.
    The Cadillac rolled slowly down the avenue, the four occupants inspecting sidewalks jammed with cigar-chomping men in their crisp
guayaberas
— the white cotton shirts of the tropics — and women in bright-colored skirts and blouses. The street was lined with shops and family businesses: boutiques and factories where underpaid employees rolled cigars by hand; sidewalk counters selling aromatic Cuban coffee and
churros,
long spirals of deep-fried sweet dough.
    They passed the Bay of Pigs monument, standing tall and proud in Cuban Memorial Plaza, and one of the men in the back seat crossed himself, muttering a hasty benediction. In the front seat, riding shotgun, his companion merely frowned and looked away.
    It was so long ago, so many years and wasted lives, but still the memory was sharp, painful. He wondered if it ever would recede, give up its power to bring a lump into his throat.
    Someday, perhaps. When all the debts were canceled out, repaid in full.
    Someday.
    But not this day.
    They turned off
Calle Ocho
into a residential side street, rolling along past neatly kept houses, many of them with shrines on the lawns, devoted to Saint Lazarus.
    Only a parable now to the Catholic church, Lazarus was a living hero to the exiles for his ability to persevere through poverty and pain. They saw themselves in Lazarus — and shared the hope that broken lives might one day be revived in
Cuba libre.
Saint Lazarus was the living symbol of rebirth, of the human spirit's stubborn refusal to stay down.
    A few more blocks, the houses smaller now, devoid of shrines, still neat but no longer picturesque. Beside the driver, Toro scanned the houses, searching for